ordu

Doesn't seem cynical enough to me. Some people make money on oil, coal, and gas, and it doesn't matter what they believe about the climate, they would do anything to continue enriching themselves. It is even worse, really, because they are not just some individuals, it is a big network of organizations. And some states too have their GDP dependent on a fossil fuel trade. You can probably talk a capitalist into surrendering their money-making practices, if they are damaging the Earth, but you can't convince an organization to dissolve or a state to go into a deep recession.

If everyone licked the wall, wouldn't they lick away the cathedral and make it into a shapeless cave?

Well, it is always was so? It doesn't matter if the person claiming things is impersonator or not, either you dive into the topic yourself and decide for yourself, or you wait for a consensus among specialists to settle.

I mean, in 2026, after the rise of the Internet, where lies are widespread, AND after the rise of an AI, that removed such anchors of truth as a video proof for example, I believe everyone smart spend some time meditation on an operational definition of truth and now has something that doesn't depend on knowledge that the source is not an impersonator.

It was a surprise for me as a reader. When I came to this sentence I assumed that 0f ff would become #1 and 0fb9 -- #2. But no, Intel counts from zero, so there is a third ud.

I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.

I agree, that he misses one thing: to claim that someone/something is conscious we need to believe that they have abilities to feel, maybe to reflect, maybe something else. The exact list of abilities to have is not known for me and different people would propose different lists, but still we can't claim rock to be consciousness just because we care about it.

Still I forgive him for it, because he is talking about LLMs, not about rocks. They have some abilities, and he claims that they are enough, what is missing is us caring for LLMs enough.

> If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that.

No, I don't think he meant to say this. I believe he talked about how society forms social conventions who is conscious and who is not. You see, I don't know the cashier you talk about, but I believe they possess consciousness. Why? Because they are human, and our social conventions say that every (non-sleeping) human is conscious. It is a simple rule of thumb at work, no deep philosophy or psychology involved. But were those social conventions came from? Who and how decided that every human is conscious? Why? But the story didn't just end at that decision, because now people debate about consciousness of animals and LLMs. And these debates make me (and the author of the article) think that "consciousness" in these debates is a buzzword like phlogiston was in thermodynamics before thermodynamics was invented.

Yes, he says exactly that explicitly, that in his view we should look backwards.

> We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain.

I can agree that we say that we care because of consciousness, but still I'm not convinced, to me it looks very much like a rationalization.

Some people care about animals and to that end they claim that animals possess consciousness, because if they do everyone should care about animal welfare. These animal welfare activists do not start with some insight about animal consciousness, they start with caring about animals, and then they invent an argument that can persuade others. It is exactly as the author of the article says: caring comes first, declaration of consciousness comes second.

Honestly, I do not know what consciousness is, I'm in doubt, but playing a devil's advocate, it looks very much like a concept that was invented to prove that Homo Sapience is something special, more than a mere animal. To demarcate animals and humans, so when we denied animals any rights we had a great sounding excuse for that: "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't".

> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions?

Exactly. Animal welfare activists care about animals' feelings and emotions and therefore they claim that animals possess consciousness. Meat eaters don't want to be inconvenienced by thoughts of suffering animals, so they claim that animals do not possess consciousness. Both claims have little to do with actual consciousness, it is just a political game. I care about my pets, and it doesn't matter whether they possess consciousness or not, I would care about them in any case. I don't need any great sounding excuses to care about them. But at the same time I don't need to talk others into caring about my pets, if I needed it, probably I'd start talking about animal consciousness too.

> This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite.

That guy may be wrong, but if I'm allowed to give advice, I'd suggest you to stop and try to understand what he says. I'm really worried a bit about how consciousness debates unfold sometimes. They tend to slip into a political side and people mostly don't notice it. People saying "consciousness" while implying "human/animal rights" or obligations. It is just muddying the water.

If we want these debates to progress constructively, we have to be very careful with references to consciousness, maybe just forbid them completely in these debates. One can't measure consciousness, one can't even state clearly what consciousness is, but still they say "consciousness" to make their words sound more objective. And the worst part of it: it often works.

When I moved from DOS to Linux, I chuck away TUI file managers and switched to pure CLI and never looked back. I could use GUI file manager, there you can really use mouse, without that jumpy-movements it has in TUI apps. But I wouldn't touch Midnight Commander or whatever.

I tried to run emacs in a terminal. Emacs' support of GUI toolkits is very cumbersome thing. But guess what forced me to abandon this experiment? Emacs is keyboard-driven, and terminals have issues with some keys, while GUI apps can deal with virtually anything.

> If we had a cross-platform usable GUI framework, and more consistency across OSes, the story would be different.

Try egui. I really like it. I'm not sure how much it is cross-platform though, hadn't tried it outside of Linux, but it is really nice. Or if you are an elm-purist then iced might be your choice. Iced lacks on widgets, it has just some basic ones, and if you need something to render a 2d-plot, then you are on your own.

Pity. I laid great hopes on that particular phrase.

It surprises me, that you don't know. But if you wanted to know you'd ask LLM, not me, right? So I'd rather spare myself from explaining it.

> I think it's totally fine (and even good) to talk about the flaws in stuff.

To talk about the flaws and public shame are different thing, don't you think?

People already tried to cancel others because they didn't agree with them. Eventually the most of people came to a conclusion that it is no good. I think at least that the most did just that. So I'm proposing another solution, just ignore what you don't like. No one is forcing you to read a blog that uses AI generated images or uses a wrong color for its background.

Can you elaborate how it may work? I mean if I create a function:

fn fail_silently(txn: Transaction) {}

then the calling code would pass the compiler, but this function presumably isn't, ok. But what can make these functions to pass:

impl Transaction { pub fn commit(self) { ... } pub fn rollback(self) { ... } }

Would you need to destructure self or what?

In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.

If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.